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5 Tips to Create a Daily Schedule Template

When building your restaurant’s employment schedule, you’ve got three major options - pen and paper, scheduling software, or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. In this article, we’ll look closer at the daily schedule template spreadsheet.

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Using Microsoft Excel to Build a Schedule Template for Your Restaurant

When building your restaurant’s employee schedule, you’ve got three useful options to choose from - pen and paper, scheduling software, or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. In this article, we’ll look closer at the daily schedule template spreadsheet.

One of the most discussed elements of running a successful restaurant is hands down, scheduling. Typically, the daily schedule is the one task that has the potential to cause the most grief to administrators, as the availability of every single employee must be carefully considered before making the proper decisions. Beyond this, there is also the matter of scheduling changes, which can crop up at any point and must be reacted to immediately to ensure that the restaurant continues to function without any major hiccups in the schedule.

As we’ve suggested countless times on this blog, the best way to manage the scheduling in your restaurant is through a scheduling management system, such as Zip Schedules. For some, though, the idea of going all in on a piece of scheduling software that may be missing key features is daunting. We get it, and we completely understand wanting to dip your toes into the waters of digital scheduling management before fully committing to a piece of software.

Because of this, we’ve devised another method that will warm administrators up to the idea of managing their daily schedule digitally without the need to go all in on a system that is so highly optimized. That method involves making use of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to create a daily schedule template and to manage your scheduling. This method is still digital-based, but without some of the intimidation from trying to learn a brand-new piece of software and implement it effectively overnight.

In this article, we’re going to give you five tips that will help you make the most use of the daily schedule template approach. In particular, we are going to focus on using Excel spreadsheet templates as a means of creating a recurring option for quick scheduling maintenance and development. By the end, the goal is to have you feeling confident in your ability to transition to a much more functional, user-friendly method of scheduling as soon as tomorrow.

Write Everything Out

One tip that we always recommend for those designing an Excel template for anything, especially a daily schedule template, is to make sure you have all of the important information at your disposal before you begin. This means having a list of all of your employees that will be on the schedule written out and kept next to you for reference so you can be sure you don’t forget anyone. Depending on how far in advance you like to plan out your daily schedule, you may even want to keep a calendar handy to keep track of where everything is date wise. Just remember, for creating a daily schedule template, you aren’t entering employee information or dates just yet; that will come when you employ the template for use each scheduling cycle.

Make It Easy to Edit

Something that seems to escape plenty of people when designing a daily schedule template in Excel is the fact that it needs to be easily changeable. Often, they put so much energy into the precision and detail of the template that on the off-chance, a few months down the line something changes in the restaurants operational hours, they spiral into a stress-induced situation trying to re-adjust their template. Your daily schedule template should be as flexible as your restaurant itself, able to adjust to meet the new trends or challenges that may come your way.

Make Everything Clear

You’d be amazed how often clarity is overlooked for the ability to make everything look “attractive.” The truth of the matter is that, on a visual level, we are more attracted to things that are less cluttered. Creating a daily schedule template that is complete in the information it contains, without looking overcrowded, is already a huge step in the right direction for helping to curb any confusion when employees come to read the schedule and take note of their hours.

Use Different Fonts/Font Styles

Another trick to make the daily schedule template easier to read, understand, and navigate, is to use different fonts or styles of the font in each of the unique categories and sections of the template. This can help signify to the reader that they are looking at a unique kind of information that, while linked to everything else, is different regarding how they should remember and understand it.

Don’t Shoot for Perfect

Something else that cannot be overstated is the fact that striving to craft a perfect daily schedule template will almost always result in a mess, rather than a clear, organized example. This can be applied to multiple areas in life, but that’s a discussion better suited for a different publication than this. In our context, understand that you don’t need your daily schedule template to be perfect; you need it to be complete and functional. Ultimately, the only person who is going to give it any further thought than asking themselves what hours they work this week is you. Keep that in mind when you set out designing your template.

There you have it - our five useful tips for developing a functional, complete, and practical daily schedule template for use in your scheduling needs. We hope that you’ve found this informative and that you are not only more confident in your ability to craft such a template, but also in your ability to begin transitioning to a more streamlined, digital-based mode of operation within your restaurant.